I found these videos a few weeks ago: "Colliding Particles." They are must-watchable. I've watched them repeatedly since. They're about the, well, men who are working on the Large Hadron Collider.
I love the series for a lot of reasons. Because they're beautiful. Because they're brilliant. Because they're funny. Because they make something terrifically abstract terribly real, something intensely complicated wooingly mundane, something incomprehensibly inaccessible deeply common.
They also remind me a bit of what it was like to "grow up" on the UC Berkeley campus, where my father was a professor. When you run the halls of academia as a child, it resonates in a way that's romantic. All those crazy faculty parties. The random international prize winners. It's not peeking behind the curtain; it's living there. I miss being steeped in genius.
This one is my favorite because he talks about what it's like when you go beyond the beyond. What do you do when you're the expert? Where do you go when the guideposts stop? How far can you take it when you're in uncharted terrain? It's all up to you now: the failure, the success, the everything in between.
One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said, "I’ve known you for years. Everyone has said that you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you that I think you’re more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged." -- Duras
